American music critics rejected the progressive rock genre as pretentious and over-the-top, a regression of culture, almost from its very beginnings.

Though “progressive jazz” had been used as a term of approbation of and for non-trendy, non-danceable jazz since the late 1920s, the term “progressive rock” saw print only for the first time in the English language (and, I presume, anywhere) in 1968 in the Chicago Tribune.  This first mention of prog carried no deep disgust or glorious praise, just a simple and descriptive recognition that this was not regular pop or rock.

In the fall of the same year, the New York Times (August 4 issue date) lamented that by making “the leap from sewer to salon, pop music has ceased to be an adventure.”

While certainly “ musically advanced,” the Times continued, progressive rock had made its art “emotionally barren.”  Even the most intellectual of critics, the paper continued, could see that the “new, cerebral audience has endangered that raw vitality” of rock.

A few months later, the Times (November 24 issue date) again proclaimed that the “rock hero (who is almost always a social outcast)” should be nothing less than “a liberator in musician’s drag.  His sexual display in the face of institutionalized repression becomes an act of rebellion. . . . It is immune to the censorship of ideas because its dialectic is purely rhythmic.  To do away with revolution in rock, one would have to ban the music itself in its nature as a charged version of blues.”